Cicadas of Brood II are returning to Mid-Hudson after 17 years

This photo provided by the University of Connecticut, shows a cicada in Pipestem State Park in West Virginia on May 27, 2003. Any day now, cicadas with bulging red eyes will creep out of the ground after 17 years and overrun the East Coast with the awesome power of numbers. Big numbers. Billions. Maybe even a trillion. For a few buggy weeks, residents from North Carolina to Connecticut will be outnumbered by 600 to 1. Maybe more. And the invaders will be loud. A chorus of buzzing male cicadas can rival a jet engine.(AP Photo)

Jentsch says the only real threat to people could be from pesticide overkill. He does say they can be harmful to fruit trees. (Mid-Hudson News Network photo)

HIGHLAND, N.Y. -- Get out the earplugs.

Since before the turn of the millennium, an exodus has been brewing, and in just a few weeks, hundreds of millions of noisy 17-year cicadas will emerge from the ground blanketing the Hudson Valley and beyond.

There are ordinary cicadas that come out every year around the world, but these are different. The population of cicadas about to emerge is known as Brood II, an infestation that stretches from the Carolinas to Connecticut.

Brood II consists of magicicadas -- as in magic --and are red-eyed. And they are seen only in the eastern half of the United States, nowhere else in the world.

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There are 15 U.S. cicada broods that emerge every 13 or 17 years, so that nearly every year, some place is overrun. Last year, it was a small area, mostly around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee. Next year, two places get hit: Iowa into Illinois and Missouri; and Louisiana and Mississippi. And it's possible to live in these locations and actually never see them.

Brood II is one of the bigger ones. Several experts say they really don't have a handle on how many cicadas are lurking underground but that 30 billion seems like a good estimate. At the Smithsonian Institution, researcher Gary Hevel thinks it may be more like 1 trillion.

Peter Jentsch, a Highland-based entomologist with Ulster County Cornell Cooperative Extension, said the magicicadas have been feeding quietly on the roots of trees since 1996, but when environmental temperatures are warm enough, the immature cicada will burrow out of the soil, mature into adulthood and complete the final stages of their life cycle.

They will emerge only when the ground temperature reaches precisely 64 degrees.

This should be about the end of May or the first week in June, Jentsch said.

Deciduous trees -- such as maple, oak, ash, beech, elm and cedar -- are optimal habitats for cicadas, Jentsch said, and once the cicadas have emerged, they typically cluster and stay around the environment and whatever tree or groups of trees they were feeding off of as nymphs.

"In the Hudson Valley, we see very high populations right along the river, so here in Highland, we have high populations, but across the river, in Dutchess County, toward Tivoli, they have very large forested areas of oak and other deciduous trees that these insects prefer, and the populations there are just astounding," Jentsch said.

By "astounding" populations, Jentsch was referring to an estimated average of 3 million insects per acre in the Hudson Valley. The number varies, though, based on the local environment's proximity to water, deciduous forest density and the level of urbanization or agriculture.

More urbanized areas can expect less than the estimated average, while more optimal areas can expect upward of 5 million insects per acre.

Campers and country folk should be familiar with the distinctive song of the annual cicada, but while the 17-year species is here, there will be a near constant piercing, rhythmic singing coming from about 1½ million males per acre, Jentsch said.

It's important to understand the world is not coming to an end, he said, and that by midsummer, all of the cicadas will die off and become food for birds. Their offspring will go underground, not to return until 2030.

Although they will be emerging, signing and mating en masse, these insects pose no physical threat to humans. They do migrate in swarms creating clouds of biblical proportion that will blot out the sun, as locusts do. But they do not bite, nor will they attack, and, according to Jentsch, the only real danger is caused by individuals who overreact and take inappropriate actions to eradicate them.

He said the most significant health risk is created when individuals douse their home and property with insecticides, exposing themselves, their families and their pets to high levels of poison.

The most immediate cause for concern is among commercial agriculturalists.

"When they do attach themselves onto roots of trees, they do reduce the vigor of the tree," Jentsch said. "Sometimes they reduce the overall growth, and if it's a fruit tree, like apple, it will reduce the quality of the fruit, the size, the number of fruit, the type of flowering that it goes through. So controlling these insects on fruit trees is fairly important for agriculturalists."

Jentsch said the adult female cicada deposits its eggs in first- and second-year wood, significantly compromising the structural integrity of a young tree. He said the process of depositing eggs stresses trees, and fruit-bearing branches break under the weight of developing crops.

If action is not taken to control these populations, fruit crops will be lost, he said.

There are insecticides specific for this species of cicada, and growers will have to implement them during the period of emergence up until the eggs are laid, Jentsch said.